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Great Service Desk option for IT Management
Updated September 15, 2020

Great Service Desk option for IT Management

Connie Inman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Solarwinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage)

We use SolarWinds Service Desk to keep up with help tickets from our users. Now, especially with working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been increasingly helpful to keep track of who has needed help and who still requires assistance.
  • Custom Categories
  • Time worked on each issue
  • Comments and information fields so we can keep track of work done
  • Would like previously used tags to appear as options when tagging new tickets
  • Would like to be able to add multiple assignees to a ticket
  • This tool has greatly enhanced our productivity and tracking of user issues
We are using SolarWinds Service Desk because it was here and already integrated with our computer management inventory. We also have access to Footprints, which is used campus-wide, but SolarWinds Service Desk is better for us. It is easier to use and is connected to our inventory management.
I would like to be able to aggregate a list of previously used tags so we can more easily standardize tags that have been used across all IT users creating tickets. Other than that, it helps us keep tabs on what has been done and what still needs to be resolved.

Do you think SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD)'s feature set?

Yes

Did SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SolarWinds Service Desk (SSD) again?

Yes

BeyondTrust Remote Support (formerly Bomgar), Zabbix
If you're in need of a tracking tool for your help desk tickets but don't have one already, SolarWinds Service Desk is great because it integrates your inventory management along with any help desk tickets related to the computers and mobile devices in your inventory.

SolarWinds Service Desk Feature Ratings

Incident and problem management
5.8
Organize and prioritize service tickets
5
Expert directory
5
Service restoration
5
Self-service tools
Not Rated
Subscription-based notifications
Not Rated
ITSM collaboration and documentation
8
ITSM reports and dashboards
6
ITSM asset management
10.0
Configuration mangement
10
Asset management dashboard
10
Policy and contract enforcement
Not Rated
Change management
6.0
Change requests repository
Not Rated
Change calendar
Not Rated
Service-level management
6

Using Solarwinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage)

4 - The four of us that mainly use the Service desk are Technology Infrastructure, also known as Desktop Support. We provide support for the university library faculty and staff. We have one department lead, a supervisor and two non-exempt staff and all of us use Solarwinds Service Desk (formerly Samanage) equally.
3 - The three of us that support SolarWinds Service Desk are the department lead, supervisor and our dean. I, the supervisor, uses the service desk to manage in-house issues that need to be resolved, ongoing projects that require long term or semi-long term support and just daily tech issues that we resolve. This project lets me keep an eye on what my staff are working on and how they are progressing.
  • Inventory Control and Management
  • Project Management
  • Service Desk tickets
  • Project Management - I use this to keep track of ongoing issues and orders such as our annual budget request
  • Inventory Management - The service desk lets you tag physical computers with issues they've experienced so you can see trends in issues a particular item has had
  • Replacement Schedules - I can set purchase dates and FY refresh dates so I can easily sort all of our inventory to see what is the newest and oldest so I can find out which computers are due to be renewed
  • One of the things we have not yet utilized is tracking of overall software usage across the organization, It would be useful to see for instance, how many installs of Adobe Creative Cloud we have and within that which CC programs are being used.
Solarwinds Service Desk, formerly Samanage has changed my quality of work. Prior to having this product I was managing all of our inventory with an Excel spreadsheet that I had to manually update. The Service Desk and Inventory Management aspect has made my job easier and also allowed our Business office to do the annual inventory much easier as well. I appreciate that there is an agent that works on both Mac & PC and it is so much easier to use now than when we first subscribed to this product. I compared several similar products when initially looking for a solution for what we needed and this was by far the easiest to deploy and at the time even had a Linux agent. Thankfully, we only have a handful of Linux machines so I can manually enter those into the service desk and Inventory to keep track of them as well.

Evaluating SolarWinds Service Desk and Competitors

Yes - When I first started all of the computers were tracked in IRIS (SAP) as inventory assets, but changes were made so that any item under $1500 no longer counted as an asset and was dropped off the official campus inventory which left me to track all of the hundreds of computers, tablets and devices manually using Excel. This was cumbersome and had problems if users moved computers without notifying us. Even before when all of the computers were official assets that had to be manually changed as well if an item got moved. It made doing inventory a nightmare every year and I never want to go back to that!
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Third-party Reviews
For me, the single most important factor in my decision to choose this product was having an agent I could install on every computer and tablet to track who last logged in, what software is installed, which printers are connected, serial numbers and more. I tested out a number of products in my search and found that Solarwinds (Samanage) fit all of my needs perfectly and more. There are options to create your own custom fields for your inventory items, I can add in asset tags for those items that are official university assets, and being able to add in the purchase date of an item is fantastic. Other products claimed to scan the network and find all of your computers, but in my case even limiting to the IP Ranges of the buildings wouldn't work because we share buildings with other departments. I needed something that I could install on our devices to track just our items. It works beautifully both in manual install and AD Deployment of the agent.
I don't think I would change my evaluation or selection process for anything if I had to do it over. Unless there are other newer products out there that do the same thing that might have made my decision harder, but all of the changes that have come to Samanage since becoming SolarWinds have been mostly good improvements. It is harder to search by MAC addresses now, but there are work around for that and you can use wildcards to search for that string. I have been very happy with this product and hope it stays around for a very long time!

SolarWinds Service Desk Implementation

I appreciate the help from the Samanage team in helping us get started using this product years ago and their continued support in helping us try out all of the other features we never thought to try at the time. They regularly check in with us to see how we're doing and see if there's anything they can do to assist us further.
  • Don't know
Change management was minimal - When we implemented Samanage we had help from the Samanage team at the time to get us set up. As we were using manual tools before there were only good changes. They helped us with writing the AD Group Policy script to deploy the agent to all of our windows machines and then we had to manually install the agent on the Mac machines. This has been a live changer for us and I never want to go back to manually tracking our equipment again.
  • At the time there was also a Linux agent, trying to get that installed on the various flavors of Linux we have was not intuitive based on the directions they provided. There is no longer a Linux agent so we do have to manually track those few computers.

SolarWinds Service Desk Training

  • Online training
When we first purchased Samanage (now Solarwinds) they provided us with an informational training session to show us all of the basics on how the service works and showed us everything we were interested in using. There are still some areas of Solarwinds that we do not yet utilize but I know if we choose to use them in the future we would be able to schedule another session with our representative to have them show us what we need to know.

SolarWinds Service Desk Support

ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
Yes - The problem was just a minor annoyance and it did get resolved. It took a while to resolve probably because it was just a minor issue and nothing that actually caused a problem. It was an issue with custom text boxes where if you hit enter it just saved rather than moved to the next line.
I have had several video chats with representatives so I could show them what we were doing and they were able to show me other ways of doing that and provide insight on other functions that we were not yet using and how they might help us as an organization. I have appreciated the hands on help from support and our representatives and it shows me they care about us as more than just a customer.

Using SolarWinds Service Desk

ProsCons
Like to use
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • I love the ease of sorting columns in the inventory view
  • It is very easy to search for an item or an issue
  • Merging tickets is really cumbersome and doesn't work the way I thought they would. They just attach themselves together rather than actually MERGING the tickets.
  • Also when creating a ticket in the first place there is no way to enter time already worked until after you first create the ticket then reopen it. It's an annoyance but not a deal breaker.
  • When creating a new ticket they've recently changed the layout and adding tags is not as intuitive as it was before. I also wish there was a way to see previously used tags so we could standardize the wording of tags across all tickets.
It is very easy to create tickets and assign them to one of my employees to take care of. Some recent changes have been made to the interface when creating new tickets and it is now less intuitive on where you add tags for the ticket. I wish that previously used tags became an option to select or got automatically added as sub categories to my created categories. Overall though it is very easy to use and I am thankful we have it.

SolarWinds Service Desk Reliability

We have over 500 computers and tablets across our organization and this has helped us greatly in keeping track of where computers are and who is currently using it. I can see this product being useful to groups both larger and smaller than us and I really appreciate this product.
Because the data is stored on Amazon Web Services (AWS) there are very rarely any outages. There have been some times when the product has been slow to load, but because the interface is web based it could be anything between my computer and AWS that was causing the issue. But also, because the application is web based it can be access from anywhere which makes it very convenient.
We don't integrate Solarwinds with any other software or system so I can't comment on that, but the few times there has been an outage for SolarWinds/Samanage the notification has come quickly that there is an outage and they're working on it. Overall though everything loads quickly and it is very reliable.

Relationship with SolarWinds

It has been several years now since we initially purchased Solarwinds which was known as Samanage at the time. I think the biggest problems were on our end dealing with making sure that all of our requirements were met. I know that as we grew our usage of the product we had to increase the number of licenses for admin users and the number of agents in use and all of that went very smoothly.
We have a representative that regularly contacts us to see how things are going and to check on us. It is nice to know they're there for us when we need help!
My business office handled this part of the sale so I do not know what negotiations were made.
They are people too, so as long as you remember that and talk to your representatives like people and not an organization then you should have no problem talking to them.